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Walkom: Threat of oil spill disaster worse in Canada

For Canada, the lessons from the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster are bleak.

The United States may have stumbled into the worst ecological disaster in its history. But we have deliberately chosen to head in the same direction.

American regulation of the offshore oil industry has been revealed as a sham. Our regulation of drilling in the far harsher North Atlantic and Arctic is said by experts to be even weaker.

And thanks to what is in effect a conspiracy between the governing Conservatives and opposition Liberals to avoid an early election, Canada’s environmental rules are about to be further gutted.

No one is innocent. The Newfoundland government strongly supports Chevron’s drilling in the stormy Orphan basin, some 450 kilometres into the North Atlantic, even though a spill there would be almost impossible to contain. The reason? Premier Danny Williams thirsts after the tax revenues that big oil generates.

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A review panel of the Inuit-dominated government of Nunavut supports seismic testing to locate offshore oil in the Eastern Arctic for the same reason.

A Liberal government under Paul Martin relaxed the rules for Arctic oil exploration. A Conservative government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper is easing the rules even more.

There is no mystery as to what drives this. Oil is the new gold; the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea is the new El Dorado. Harper’s much vaunted northern initiative, which has seen the entire cabinet travelling to Baffin Island, is not about abstract issues of sovereignty; it is about oil.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the Gulf spill is what it has revealed about the relative clout of governments and big oil. In spite of U.S. President Barack Obama’s bluster, British Petroleum is still in charge of handling the oil leak it helped to create.

That’s not because BP is doing a good job; rather, it is because the U.S. government — BP’s ostensible regulator — has so little expertise in offshore drilling that it would do even worse.

The tendency of regulators to become captives of the firms they oversee is well-known. Think of the CRTC’s willingness to approve virtually every fee increase the telephone and cable firms demand.

But oil regulators make the CRTC seem fiercely independent. Until the Gulf spill occurred, Ottawa’s National Energy Board appeared poised to give Arctic drillers – including BP – an exemption from crucial environmental safety rules, simply because they found them inconvenient.

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But with oil washing up on the Louisiana coastline, politicians across North America are ducking for cover. Obama has declared a moratorium on Arctic oil exploration. Canada’s NEB has launched what it calls a full review of Arctic drilling. Harper insists that his government is putting the environment first.

None of this is expected to last long. Obama’s moratorium is due to be lifted next year. Canada’s federal government is quietly pushing ahead with plans to give the oil industry a double boost — first by giving the more pliant NEB sole responsibility for the environmental assessment of Arctic oil proposals; second by letting the cabinet exempt some projects from scrutiny altogether.

The opposition Liberals, desperate to avoid an election they might lose, are refusing to block either.

The politicians and their oil friends calculate — probably correctly — that a year from now the Gulf spill will be forgotten, the media will again be focused on Tiger Woods’ sex life and few will be paying attention to who regulates what in the Beaufort Sea.

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